Recommendation components or engines are primarily used by electronic commerce sites to suggest products and services to their customers and to provide users with information to help them decide which products or services to purchase. Most often, the products and services recommended are based on purchase or browse histories, or item compatibility.
One feature of electronic commerce with which customers are familiar and upon which vendors have increasingly come to rely is a recommendations component or engine as part of the display of content. Recommendation components or engines attempt to identify, or otherwise present, items that will elicit a desired behavior for a user. For example, when a customer selects an item to view or purchase, the hosting electronic commerce site provides a list of recommendations of alternative and/or complimentary items that the customer may also wish to purchase. In this example, the desired activity can include the additional selection of the items presented for purchase, the selection of the item for review, the generation of awareness about an item (via selection or display on the screen), and the like.
Recommendation components or engines can operate in a manner to accept a set of inputs (e.g., one or more inputs), process the inputs and then generate an output of recommendations in a manner that can be consumed. The set of inputs can include a customer's prior purchases and purchase tendencies, information about items (e.g., product categories, genres, types), community information (e.g., consumer ratings, other consumer purchases, consumer feedback), and the like. Accordingly, recommendation results can differ among recommendation components or engines based on factors such as the number and type of inputs that are inputted into the engine or component. Additionally, the recommendation results can also differ among recommendation components or engines as how certain inputs are processing (e.g., the recommendation engine). As such, content providers often review and modify recommendation components or engines for the purposes of improving effectiveness (e.g., eliciting the desired behavior).